Cornelius Castoriadis An Interview The following interview with Cornelius Castoriadis took place at the University of Essex, in late Feburary 1990. Castoriadis is a leading figure in the thought and politics of the postwar period in France. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s he was a member of the now almost legendary political organization, Socialisme […]

Nietzsche: A Radical Challenge To Political Theory? Keith Ansell-Pearson Only if mankind possessed a universally recognised goal would it be possible to propose ‘thus and thus is the right course of action’: for the present there exists no such goal. It is thus irrational and trivial to impose the demands of morality upon mankind. – […]

Feminism and Images of Autonomy Pauline Johnson It is by now widely accepted that feminist politics has meant the expansion of our understanding of the nature of the political. Feminism’s powerful critique of the oppressive character of traditionall y structured relations between the sexes is seen to have added new depth and meaning to the […]

REVIEWS FEMINIST FUTURES Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female?, London, VIrago, 1986. Lynne Segal, in Is the Future Female?, criticises much contemporary feminism as uniformly celebrating difference between the sexes, and thereby downplaying the changes that have taken place, historically, in women’s lifes, and the social, psychological and economic variations amongst women. Offering analyses of […]

Beyond State and Civil Society

Socialism and Democracy: Beyond State and Civil Society Roger Harris Introduction This article started life as a review of John Keane’s Public Life and Late Capitalism ..:. Towards ~ Socialist Thaor y of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1984), an Lt begins with a brief account of this important book. In the sections which follow I […]

COMMENT Strange Days for Philosophers Geoffrey Thomas Philosophers appear to have an unquiet certainty that something is happening to their subject. What I don’t think is happening is the “end” of philosophy. Rather there is a confusion of two things which are very easily detachable. As a distinctive activity philosophy is ineliminable at a certain […]

l’reecloDl and Alienalion RossPoole 1 According to Hegel For freedom it is necessary that we should feel no presence of something else which is not ourselves. 1 Taken at face value, this makes little sense. For what are we to make of the idea of ‘feeling no presence of something else which is not ourselves’? […]

PiRSONAL AUTONOMY a: HISTORICAL MATERIALISM Richard Archer The following is largely a criticism of some of the mistakes and certain tendencies antithetical to an historical materialist conception of the world found in Eoss Poole’s paper ‘Freedom and Alienation’. (Radical Philosophy, Winter 1975). Basically the criticism is this: because Poole never entirely leaves the framework employed […]

Totalitarianism and the welfare state

In his appraisal of mass societies, Theodor W. Adorno brieﬂy discussed those changes in Western economies that had helped to transform the earlier liberal phase of ʻfree marketʼ capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Responding in part to these changes, governments legislated into existence social welfare institutions and agencies that quickly became more […]

Discipline, subjectivity and freedom

This article is intended to raise a number of connected issues. It concludes by suggesting that certain theories of self-organization, in particular the theory of autopoiesis developed by Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela and, latterly, Fritjof Capra, might help us to reassess how we view the relationship between discipline, subjectivity and freedom. However, the ﬁrst half […]

Post-Marxism and the ethics of modernity

Interview agnes heller Post-Marxism and the ethics of modernity ST: Iʼd like to begin by asking you about your ﬁrst encounter with philosophy. What made you decide to do philosophy and what were the practical ramiﬁcations of such a choice in the 1940s?Heller: When I started university I wanted to be a scientist and I […]

But if this position rightly demolishes the opposition between art and technological mediation enshrined in late modernist theory1 it nevertheless suffers from its own kind of blindness: the identiﬁcation of technological mediation with the democratization of form. By subsuming art under technology, this kind of thinking renders the connection between form and ethics harmless or […]

Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason

…we read [in Herderʼs text]: ʻIt would be an easy principle, but an evil one, to maintain in the philosophy of human history than man is an animal who needs a master, and who expects from this master, or from his association with him, the happiness of his ultimate destiny.ʼ … [We read further that] […]

Luhmann, Heidegger and the false ends of metaphysics

The political reception of Niklas Luhmann in the English-speaking world is still localized. His death in 1998 triggered a wider general interest in his work, and its susceptibility to reception in cultural theory has been clearly registered. [1] However, political debate on his writings is still largely conﬁned to the theoretically tuned regions of legal […]

An aesthetic education against aesthetic education Stewart martin Documenta 12ʼs commitment to the question of what is to be done in education is to be welcomed from an institution that has sought to sustain itself as an autonomous cultural realm, a public sphere, in the face of its fabulous state sponsorship and relations to the […]

Dossier universities The performative without condition A university sans appel barbara cassin and philippe büttgen‘responsibility’ and the homonymy of autonomy ‘Take your time but be quick about it, because you don’t know what awaits you’, said French philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1998 at Stanford. [1] Indeed. He would not have expected to be cited like […]